


Flowers

by trascendenza



Category: Merlin (BBC)
Genre: Character of Color, F/F, POV Female Character, layers, my holiday project 2009
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-20
Updated: 2009-12-20
Packaged: 2017-10-05 13:39:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 608
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/42326
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trascendenza/pseuds/trascendenza
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><em>She wonders what light will call Gwen forth, what combination of sun, water, and earth.</em></p>
            </blockquote>





	Flowers

Gwen is lying in the grass below her, face soft in the illumination of the afternoon, her smile warm and lazy with the sun's heat. _Morgana,_ she murmurs, and Morgana traces a single fingertip along the outline of Gwen's face, smiling.

In that moment, she sees Gwen as a perfect, contained bud, her petals furled tightly inside the protective green layer, her small teardrop shape concealing the breadth she will one day claim as her own. She is waiting, Morgana senses, for just the right moment to uncurl, to stretch into the entirety of what she might be.

She wonders what light will call Gwen forth, what combination of sun, water, and earth.

_Gwen,_ she says, reverently, and picks a single gentian bloom, stringing it in Gwen's hair. The time will come when rivers run dry and the earth crumbles to dust, but right now, the birds sing and the stars turn and she has no time for dark, far-off futures.

*

Gwen stands with her hands on the stone, looking out over the land, the people below, going about their day to day business. All she sees is hers to tend, now, and the weight of the crown feels like predestination she's not sure she wanted. She will accept it with dignity.

*

There is enough love in their marriage. They do not want; they do not do not lack. She thinks of how she once forgot to breathe when Arthur took her in his arms, and smiles fondly for such youth. Age does not grant her such leniency, and as the entire kingdom watches, waiting for her first mistake, she breathes down into the base of her spine and looks back, unflinching. The days that she wilted beneath the disdainful court's gaze are long gone. She is too tired to fear.

She watches Arthur take to ruling like a bird to the sky; his bearing speaks of rarefied air, his eagerness of a gathering storm. She feels herself rooting, sinking her feet into granite and sand, and it is all laid out before her like a living, breathing map: a stone here, a stone there. Piece by piece, she builds a foundation as steady as the land beneath.

*

If Gwen's visits to Morgana's home are longer than necessary and Arthur spends overlong with Merlin riding nowhere, they do not speak of it. They do not need to. Their duties do not extend that far.

Strange that, in end the end, Merlin is the mystic sanctioned by the golden King and no one dares question him while Morgana is the outcast, all eyes cast aside when she passes by. Gwen wonders whether Morgana knew it would be so, whether she ever feared. She wonders what life she might have had if Morgana had shaped the future instead of turning her face from it.

*

Gwen is standing in the grass before her, face soft in the illumination of the eve, smile cool and quiet in the moon's silver wash. _Morgana,_ she murmurs, and Morgana traces a single fingertip along the outline of Gwen's face, breathing.

In that moment, she looks at Gwen and sees the beginning of a mythology outlined in flesh and bone, a lineage as old as the precious metals in the crown she wears. She will have her Camelot, man or beast who stands in her way be damned.

_Gwen,_ she says, reverently, and picks a single gentian bloom, stringing it in Gwen's hair. The time will come when rivers run dry and the earth crumbles to dust, but right now, the birds sleep and the stars burn and she has no time for dark, far-off futures.


End file.
